Faith by moonlight: Christian hope for the healing of eating disorders

Eating disorders are a prevalent illness of the modern age and in recent decades the number of sufferers has increased globally. The majority are women but growing numbers of men have joined their ranks.¹ Variants of the disorder have proliferated as well, as if the illness were paying sardonic homage to the value of diversity. Recovery is possible but precarious; health consequences are serious and potentially deadly.²

Debate about “ED” causes and treatment is ongoing among medical professionals and there is a lively cross-disciplinary discussion among academic professionals about the social significance of these baffling illnesses. In recent years, the sufferers themselves have been invited to join in the discussion, sharing their experiences and insights. I accept the invitation! I am a former bulimic who experienced significant healing in answer to prayer.

I am now a professional historian with research interests in women and religion. Writing from a Christian perspective, I would like to contribute to the discourse and ultimately, I hope, to the healing of eating disorders.

Early life and early questions

Let me start, then, by sharing my own story.

I grew up in a small town in upstate New York. My father was a professor of religious studies at a private university, my mother was a high school history teacher and later a journalist for the local newspaper. My younger sister and I were raised Episcopalian, and I accepted the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. It was, in many respects, a wholesome childhood. I had a stable home, I enjoyed school and loved my parish church, and I have happy memories of the bright green summers and frigid but sparkling winters of the land we called “the North Country.”

Yet I also grew up with a loneliness that deepened as I entered my teenage years in the 1970s. Although I could not have articulated the problem at the time, I had no deep friendships and no way to resolve conflicts or clear up misunderstandings. I could not speak my mind freely. I had a social life that involved orchestra, choir, and ballet. With my friends I looked forward to a “fulfilling career” (the two words went together like peanut butter and jelly), and I dutifully read my mother’s Ms. magazines, not admitting even to myself that I disliked them. I wanted a healthy dating life, the kind I read about in young adult novels.

My generation scoffed at the idea of romance, but I wanted to meet an affectionate male friend, eventually marry him, and have children. Sex would wait until marriage, as my parents taught me. This was, my father explained, “the most loving way.” It had been their way, it was the norm, and I believed in it. It hurt, though, that I was never asked out on a date in high school. I tried doing the asking once, with dismal results. No matter, I thought, everything would change once I went away to college.

Like many teenaged girls, I became self-conscious about the weight I put on. My mother sometimes chided me about the extra pounds, but the cookies in the tin on the kitchen counter were always delectable. I developed some anorexic tendencies, as I remember some rigorous dieting and a certain period during which I would wake up at 5:00 a.m. to exercise quietly in my room. In the end, however, I was a poor excuse for an anorexic. I simply became too hungry to carry on.

I did some serious thinking in the privacy of my bedroom. Comparing what I knew of the main world religions, I decided to remain a Christian. Christianity best accounted for the brokenness of the world, as well as offered a remedy for it. In the aftermath of the public debate over Roe v. Wade, I also became pro-life. It was self-evident to me that a developing child was a human being, regardless of which side of the uterine wall he or she happened to be on. (Location matters only in real estate.)

It was the first serious matter in which I found myself in disagreement with my parents, who saw abortion as a necessary evil. “We don’t really know that it’s a human being,” said my mother. “What else would it be?” I thought. “There may be good reasons for an abortion,” said my father. “There may be excellent reasons to kill a four-year-old, or a fourteen-year-old, except that it would be the killing of a human being,” I thought. But I did not voice my thoughts, and the conversation ended there.

Loss of equilibrium

Everything did indeed change when I went away to college. In an Ivy League school in an urban environment, I was amazed by my classmates’ brilliance. I drank in the intellectual and cultural life, attended the lectures, film showings, and residence dining hall discos, but I felt culturally homeless. I did not have a clear vision for my “fulfilling career.” After some groping, I chose a major in Japanese Studies, mainly because I had fallen in love with the elegance of the Japanese aesthetic.

I was asked out on dates now, but the sexual revolution had become mainstream and, in the age before AIDS, premarital sex was expected, almost obligatory, while marriage was treated as distant and irrelevant. My dates quickly degenerated into arguments over whether to copulate. The affectionate boyfriend eluded me, and I was lonelier than before. I was angry at the men who pressed me for sex, apparently never considering that reproductive behavior might lead to reproduction. I thought that, in that case, they could not care about me as they claimed they did. I could not say this, however. I could only break up with them on the grounds that we were too different.

I wonder how many others could not speak their minds freely. To the best of my recollection, this sexual climate was never openly questioned by the school’s administration or faculty. I recall one professor’s comment in class that the belief that couples should wait until marriage was “neanderthal.” The chaplain’s office raised the question once, in the context of a student fellowship meeting, but did not offer answers. I heard no dissenting voices among the students, either. There were some quiet nonconformists, but it was the students who reveled in the climate who were outspoken. Eventually, my commitment to chastity dissolved. I did not call it chastity at the time–I thought that sounded puritanical. I would have worded my capitulation something like this: “I wanted to wait until marriage, but nobody believes in that anymore, and nobody cares. I wonder what’s wrong with me that I care?”

At the same time, I somehow remained pro-life, enough so that I argued against Judith Jarvis Thompson’s well-known 1971 article “A Defense of Abortion” in a paper I wrote for an ethics class.³ The problem, I thought, was that Thompson treated pregnancy as an arbitrary event that struck a woman while she was merely going about her own business, enjoying her life, rather than the natural result of a natural act. I could not deny my own bio-logic on that point. Still, I could not mentally resist the social culture that relentlessly separated sex from procreation. I could make an argument against Thompson’s thesis to my professor. I could not make an argument against premarital sex to my date. While I lost my equilibrium, I did not lose my physical integrity. I can only attribute this to a mysterious providence that sometimes protects us from our own misguided selves.

It was in college that I developed full-fledged bulimia nervosa. I used sweets for emotional sustenance but induced vomiting to avoid the weight gain that I thought would make me unattractive. I had no name for my condition, however, and did not recognize it as an eating disorder. In my mind, I was coping with the stress of college life and would stop once I had graduated. My dorm mates realized I had a problem with food and insisted that I get a medical evaluation. The doctor’s notes describe me as thin and anxious-looking, possibly anorexic, but the tests showed that I was reasonably healthy, and that was the end of the matter.

Prayer and Mother Teresa

After graduating in 1982, I lived in Japan for a couple of years, supporting myself by teaching English conversation. I absorbed the beauty of the country, visiting the historic places I had studied, continuing my study of the language, thinking I might have found my home. I attended a Japanese Anglican Church in the Tokyo area.

About a year into my stay, I learned that Mother Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) had a convent in Tokyo. A long-time admirer of Mother Teresa, I began to volunteer with her Missionaries of Charity and often joined them in prayer afterward. The Sisters visited non-Japanese hospital patients who were in Tokyo for the treatment of serious illnesses, and through this work I met a young Indonesian woman, Rita. She was in excruciating pain from cancer and, feeling helpless in the face of her sufferings, I promised to pray for her daily. Before this, I had not prayed in private, at least, not with any regularity. Rita died, for all my prayers. We grieved, but the Sisters did not lose faith and I was buoyed by their example. By that time, my prayers for Rita had become a habit of daily prayer.

I now began to pray for my own healing from an eating disorder, including the psalms in my prayers each morning. By this time, I realized that I had a serious condition. The beloved singer Karen Carpenter had died of anorexia in 1983, highlighting awareness of the disease. I picked up a copy of Steven Levenkron’s Treating and Overcoming Anorexia Nervosa in a Tokyo bookstore, knowing that I was not anorexic but hoping I might learn something. I did. Levenkron’s book contained enough information on what he called “bulimic anorexia nervosa” for me to recognize that I, too, had a dangerous eating disorder, possibly even more dangerous than anorexia.⁴ I was now afraid, but I did not know where I could get counseling in Japan. I was able to cut back on the binging and purging but not stop altogether.

I do not know how long I prayed daily for healing. It might have been several months. In November 1984, Mother Teresa herself came to visit Japan. I was part of the crowd that pressed around the tiny, bent woman as she smiled and said, “God bless you!” to all of us, over and over. I went to hear her speak at St. Ignatius Church in Tokyo, and I was heartbroken that, as a non-Catholic, I could not receive Holy Communion.⁵ Back at my pew, I knelt and could not move even when a hand urgently pressed my shoulder. If I had stirred an inch, I would have burst out sobbing. The person with the urgent hand must have had to climb over me to get back to their spot in the pew.

Healing and freedom

The healing of my eating disorder came a few nights later. I had taught my evening class as usual and arrived at my apartment building well after sundown. I checked my mailbox and found it empty. As I closed the box, I was suddenly surrounded by the presence of God. That is the best way I can describe it. I saw and heard nothing, but the Presence was overwhelming, and a voice that I could not hear spoke directly to my mind, without using words. God told me that I would be healed of my eating disorder.

God also had a request: Would I help people who had the same illness as myself? I understood that my healing was a gift, and not conditional on my agreeing to the request. My first response, however, was an agonized, “No!” I was too ashamed to tell anyone about my eating disorder. I climbed the stairs to my second-floor apartment, tearfully repeating, “No! No! No!” at each step. I unlocked the door, walked in, closed the door behind me, and stood there in the entryway in the dark.

How do you say no to God? “All right,” I said. “Yes.”

At that moment, I felt as if a hundred-pound weight had suddenly been lifted off my shoulders. I wept freely, but now for joy. I walked to my bedroom and opened the large sliding windows that overlooked the fields in front of my apartment building. Over the tawny grasses shone an enormous, golden full moon.⁶ I received a four-fold gift that night: 1) The compulsion to binge and purge ceased and has never come back. I have never even been tempted. If that is not a miracle, it is something akin to one. 2) I was set free from all sense of shame about my eating disorder. I could have shouted the happy story of my healing from the rooftops. 3) I understood intuitively that sexual activity was reserved for marriage, even if it seemed that modern society had completely lost that conviction. 4) I now had a sense of purpose: I was to help other people with eating disorders. Ever since that night, the full moon has been for me a symbol of feminine wholeness.

The following day, I called my priest and told him what had happened. I asked him whether he knew of anyone who would like to hear my story. He told me that he had, in fact, been counseling a young anorexic parishioner but felt that he did not know what to say to her. He would ask the girl and her parents whether they would like to meet with me. All three agreed, and a short time later I knocked on their door. The parents greeted me graciously. The girl, whom I will call “Hanako,” remained in her room with the door closed. She would not allow her parents to enter, but she admitted me. I found Hanako to be a sweet-mannered, delicate girl of about eighteen. I ate the sushi dinner her parents served. She herself ate nothing.

I remember little of our conversation, but I certainly told her the story of what had just happened to me. She listened intently. At the end she asked me, with tears brimming in her eyes, “Naorimasu ka?” Roughly translated, her question was, “Can [my] eating disorder be cured?” I answered without hesitation. “Naorimasu!” Yes, you can be cured!

That was the last I saw of Hanako and her family. I moved back to the United States a few months later. Before my healing, I had already concluded that Japan was not to be my permanent home and had arranged my return. Now, however, my life had been transformed. I had a new sense of freedom. Released from the binge-purge compulsion, I was able to enjoy eating in a way that I could not in the throes of my bulimia, when every bite I took was accompanied by a sense of guilt over my abuse of food. Now, food was delicious! The prospect of gaining weight no longer worried me, and I was surprised how much I could eat without putting on extra pounds. On top of that, I had a sense of direction. I would keep my promise to God to “help” people with the same illness as myself. Finally (grace upon grace!), I now had what evangelical Christians call a personal relationship with God. God was no longer simply a truth that I believed, but a deity who had spoken to me, who answered questions, who acted in astonishing ways.

But how was I to “help” people with eating disorders? I could certainly share my story, and I did whenever the occasion called for it. But was I to simply go about telling people, “I prayed for healing and God healed me! Maybe, if you pray, God will heal you too!” This was, in effect, what I had said to Hanako, but surely my vocation could not be so facile? Besides, it seemed unfair that I should have been healed so suddenly, when I knew that other people struggled for years and sometimes decades. I also realized that I still had an emotional overdependence on food. I would need some counseling and some training if I were to be useful to others. God had not used words on the night of that full moon, but perhaps the “help” was meant to be a ministry? Was I called to be a priest? A professional counselor? And what was the connection between my healing and my intuition about sexuality?

Over the next few years, holding onto that third gift would almost kill me. In all, if I had known then how long I would be perplexed in my attempts to live out my promise to God, and how deep the darkness I would travel through, I would have been less exuberant.

Alienation and the joyous answer

Those adventure stories are for another day. Today, I am still seeking a deeper understanding of my vocation, but certain things have become clear to me. I believe the entire culture needs healing, and that there is a close connection between our abuse of food and our abuse of sex. Both are rooted in emotional hungers and in our distorted attempts to feed ourselves. The distortion springs from our profound alienation from our own bodies.

My meditations on the meaning of the body led me to the Catholic Church, which I entered in 1994. As a historian, I have been especially drawn to the Romantic evangelicalism of the early nineteenth century. For all its strictures on women, that era also celebrated a distinctively feminine genius and affirmed a male-female complementarity that closely resembles Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body. In recent years, as the climate crisis intensifies, I have become convinced of our need to live in harmony with our own bodies as well as with the natural world. Modern humanity needs both an internal and an external ecology.

Finally, I see a growing awareness in the healing professions of the value of story-telling and community.⁷ The patient with an eating disorder, once the silent object of medical intervention, is now empowered to speak as an active participant in the healing process. Undergirding all of this is God’s own power to make all things new (Rev. 21:5).

Perhaps, then, the story of my healing on that moonlit night is still the best place to start. I know that it has inspired at least a few people to seek their own recovery and I hope that it can help to illuminate a Christian understanding of the healing of eating disorders. Healing goes beyond behavior modification therapy, alleviation of depression, and even inspiring stories, although all of these are good. Ultimately, our search for wholeness is a quest for the Kingdom of God.

I sometimes ponder the fact that the very word “salvation” is derived from salus, the Latin word meaning health. Whatever the complexities of our analysis, whatever the subtlety of our insight, the fundamental question remains the same, as does the joyous answer:

Naorimasu ka?

Naorimasu!

Endnotes:

Catholic World Report